Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro
One of the most feared golf shots for the average club in handicap golf or around the course is going to be a chip from a bare lie. They really don't want to see the ball on a bare lie when it's around the side of the green because it's a difficult one to nip off the surface. So therefore you think well the easier version of that then is on a nice fluffy lie and for a lot of the time that is going to be easier a bit more grass underneath the ball we can get the club underneath it and loft the ball in the air. but like all things you can have too much of a good thing you can get yourself in a situation where the ball is on such a fluffy lie that it could actually be more difficult again now imagine this scenario here this ball is on a fluffy piece of turf now I've actually got it teed up on the practice ground it's not very fluffy but side of the green sitting on some nice spongy soft grass and I then open the face of my lob wedge because I want to hit a nice high one I don't think I've learned how to hit down on the ball and cut underneath the ball. So I then go ahead and play my shot and you can see what happened there is I completely removed the tee peg or the fluffy lie and the ball just dropped down possibly into the hole that I've just created and it went no distance at all but it still counts as a golf shot.
So there is a too much of a good thing option where the ball sits up too much on a good lie and if that is the case I need to adapt the way I'm going to play this shot that's simply what I did there was wrong because I opened the club face which made the club too narrow it slid completely on the ball the ball fell into the hole. So what we should do in this situation is still use a lofted club to play the ball a bit back in the stands you can see now how the club face is wider rather than narrower thinner. So wider in the back of my stance I play the ball a little bit deeper in the back of my stance hands a little bit more a head play with a bit less wrist hinges well and also just focus on the height of the swing I don't really want to be gouging out and taking it a bit taking the roots of the grass out here because simply the ball isn't. There the ball is not at the bottom of this grass so it's sitting up on top. So I can play more of the surface and then if I'm in this situation I can play that ball more off the surface I've still been able to hit the ball nice and high with a soft landing and you can see that I knocked the tee go over but I didn't dig it out completely. So there's a time in a place where that fluffy light is going to be helpful and sometimes it's going to hinder you a little bit to consider how you would play that ball from the fluffy lie and make sure you don't make life too difficult by chopping its legs off and leaving it completely where it was.